It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness - it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose.

I'm not an impersonator. I've only got one voice and only do one guy and his first-person essays.

Professor Al Drake encouraged me to just write the way I talk. I decided if that's what I needed to do, I didn't need to be in school to do it.

You can make a new friend but you can't make an old one.

Somebody says, 'Do a Tom Bodett, a folksy kind of thing,' and it sounds like something out of 'Hee Haw,' very insulting. They turn wry humor into disparaging sarcasm, and you get what amounts to insulting advertising.

Americans are generally very self-sufficient and I think generally averse to pretension, just as I am.

Like most Alaska immigrants, my roots continue to petition for equal time.